Ceramic tiles may be used by military and law enforcement personnel. For example, ceramic tiles may be placed into clothing worn by soldiers and police officers as personal body armor to protect against small arms fire and explosion fragments. Ceramic tile may also be use as armor plating on personnel carriers and fighting vehicles, such as tanks. Various engineering ceramics, such as silicon carbide, boron carbide, alumina, zirconia, and the like have been used for this purpose. The high hardness of these materials has been shown to be effective for preventing penetration of kinetic energy penetrators (i.e., projectiles).
Tiles of engineering glass, such as borosilicate glass and soda lime glass, are similarly used to resist chemical energy penetrators, where the projectile weapon creates a plasma jet designed to burn through the armor on armored vehicles.
Routine testing of ceramic and glass tiles during development and production has proven challenging. Traditional methods of testing, such as ballistics testing, require precise alignment of the projectile path with the tile surface, which can be tedious, time consuming, and costly, and may hinder reproducibility. In addition, ballistics testing lacks sufficient sensitivity to identify the threshold energy for damage, or to distinguish between various production parameters used to manufacture the tiles. Conventional ballistic testing of ceramic armor is described in Aspects of Geometry Affecting the Ballistic Performance of Ceramic Targets, I. M. Pickup, et al., Ceramic Transactions, Vol, 134, pp, 643-50 (2002).